


Meditative Aids

by karanguni



Category: Machineries of Empire Series - Yoon Ha Lee
Genre: Case Fic, Drug Use, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-09
Updated: 2017-12-09
Packaged: 2019-02-12 18:34:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12965805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karanguni/pseuds/karanguni
Summary: When Mikodez had told his parents,I am going to enrol in the Academy, they had every last one of them looked at Mikodez with faint amusement and beleaguered tolerance and cautioned him that the Andan were, honestly, terribly pedantic in their own boring way, and did hereallythink, Miki, that he had the patience to withstand endless discussions on the philosophy of aesthetics?'Shuos Academy,' Mikodez had qualified, patiently.





	Meditative Aids

**Author's Note:**

  * For [meguri_aite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/meguri_aite/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide! :D

When Mikodez had told his parents,  _I am going to enrol in the Academy_ , they had every last one of them looked at Mikodez with faint amusement and beleaguered tolerance and cautioned him that the Andan were, honestly, terribly pedantic in their own boring way, and did he  _really_  think, Miki, that he had the patience to withstand endless discussions on the philosophy of aesthetics?

'Shuos Academy,' Mikodez had qualified, patiently.

He'd watched as his youngest mother had broken down into peals of laughter and as his eldest father had spat out his tea. He'd waited, patient once more, as the whole lot of them tried to speak at once. And the whole time that they'd gone on offering counsel and warnings and sarcastic quips, Mikodez had watched Istradez watch him from where she'd been standing, arms crossed and braced against the arch of the door to the Vauhan residence's elaborately outfitted reception room.

* * *

'Miki,' Istradez said to him the night before he was due to go.

They were in Mikodez's room. Mikodez was unpacking and repacking a small bag of personal effects. This was possibly the fifteenth time he'd done so: his application to Shuos Academy Prime had been accepted almost as soon as he'd submitted it, and the intervening four months of waiting for semester to begin had been interminable.

Mikodez applied himself to finding a more geometrically compact way of folding the dress shirt in front of him. 'Yes?'

'There are a thousand other things in the universe that you could be doing other than going off to learn how to be an assassin,' Istradez said, tugging the shirt away from him. She did a much better job of it in a much shorter time; it disappeared back into his bag.

'The Shuos do a  _bit_  more than kill people,' Mikodez replied, sitting back and letting Istradez have at it. 'They run a sixth of the Hexarchate - they'd run out of manpower if they just slaughtered anyone who gets in their way.'

Istradez finished repacking his bag in under a minute; she took it and placed it in the corridor outside, where the servitors whipped it up and out of sight. When she came back inside and locked the door behind her, Mikodez raised an eyebrow and said, 'I'm not in the mood, sister dear.'

She rolled her eyes, turned off the lights, and then bullied Mikodez until he was in bed and trapped under the covers.

'Try not to get yourself killed,' Istradez said as she shoved a pillow unceremoniously under Mikodez's head.

'I promise,' Mikodez swore solemnly.

'Try not to get  _other people_  killed,' Istradez went on, putting a second blanket over him.

'I'm going to overheat,' Mikodez complained.

Istradez ignored him, and after a further moment's thought amended her request to something more practical: 'Try not to get other people who  _don't deserve it_  killed.'

'That's harder,' Mikodez said into the darkness. 'What do you mean by "deserve it"?'

He felt Istradez settle on top of the sheets next to him. She laid her head on his chest. 'Don't be an idiot, Miki,' she said, softly.

'I'm not going to become Andan; you needn't fear  _that_.'

'Don't be cruel because you're bored,' Istradez went on, ignoring him. 'Don't be destructive because you have idle hands.'

'Cadets don't usually go around ruining lives, even Shuos cadets.'

'Cadets become Shuos,' Istradez said. 'Shuos become foxes.'

'Or hounds. Or maybe even foxhounds.'

Istradez laughed, and Mikodez smiled and ran his fingers through her hair. 'You have to find something to do while I'm gone,' he cautioned her in turn. 'You're just as bad as me, and I don't know why they've let you carry on without a plan: maybe they thought you were going to follow me.' It occurred to Mikodez that their parents really might have. Considering Istradez's temperament,  _that_  would only have ended poorly and/or in expulsion, though Mikodez could admit to himself that the  _lead up_  to said expulsion might have been worth the front-row tickets to Istradez being an absolute disaster of a Shuos cadet. 'Which you won't, so that's a moot point. Don't let our mother turn you into a jeweller. You're better at wearing shiny things than you ever will be at making them.'

'I set fire to the workshop  _once_  and you never let me live it down,' Istradez grumbled. The silence that fell after that was more comfortable. She knew him, after all: she knew he had to go, had to get out from under the wings of their family, where nothing was ever hard enough to keep his attention. 'Why Shuos Prime, anyway? Why not the academy here on-planet - it's closer, and nothing to sniff at. Plenty of Shuos just graduate and go right on to the Citadel; I looked it up. You'd even get visitations, and the family reputation will keep you a little more insulated.'

'Don't do things halfway,' yawned Mikodez. 'Or you'll have twice as much to regret later.'

Istradez didn't argue the point. Mikodez heard and felt their breathing slowly start to synchronise, and later on he could never remember whether he dreamed or remembered Istradez leaving for her own bedroom. In any case, he woke up to the rest of his life the next day quite alone.

* * *

A messy family farewell was had the night before Mikodez's departure. It took place in the privacy of their large family home - no one needed to see the scions and spawn of the Vauhan family making a fuss in a public departure hall, even if many might have  _wanted_  to - and there was much alcohol drunk and advice dispensed, and then some farewell gifts as well. 

Mikodez opted to open the package that his parents had given him en route to the ship port the next day, alone in the car save for the driver. There were a few books, a few credit packets; the usual things one got in a farewell package.

Then there was a string of meditation beads, opalescent and polished to a lustrous blue-black sheen.

Ostensibly, the number of beads on any given set was determined by its function: some commemorated the major Remembrances, others just the minor. The set Mikodez had been given was an unusually complete one: there were sixty-six beads in total for both the major and minor Remembrances. The difference between major and minor was marked not by different bead sizes, which would have devalued the set, but instead by a subtle change in the colour tone of the composite stone. That said, _practically_ speaking a set with more beads simply meant it was more expensive. Considering that only the very devout or the very  _demonstrably_  devout bothered with meditation beads at all, opulent sets were more displays of wealth than indications of one's belief in Doctrine. Since the Vauhan were only as devout as it was politically fashionable to be, Mikodez was left to assume that this was either a very sarcastic present, or…

He flipped over the attached note.  _They can't confiscate items of doctrine,_  his parents had written.  _We checked._

Mikodez laughed and wrapped the string around his wrist. They were weighted very pleasantly: heavy enough that he felt anchored by their density, but not so heavy as to cause fatigue. When he moved, the beads clicked quietly against each other.

It was true, what his parents had written. While most of everything a cadet brought into the Academy could be shaken down and confiscated, doctrine meant that certain items, in acceptable numbers, were regularly exempted. Mikodez fingered the first bead on the string; the polished opal felt soapy, slippery. Each bead on its own was probably worth… well. Enough to barter with, and the whole set sold together would get him out of trouble if he could get access to a quick fence.

Mikodez counted off the twelve minor Remembrances leading up to the first major one - the Feast of Foxes - before he bored of it. Still, he kept the beads wrapped around his wrist, and the heavy weight of it was strangely grounding all through the journey past his local neighbourhood of stars and then farther out still to Shuos Academy Prime.

* * *

Shuos Academy was large, varying degrees of labyrinthine, and - perhaps very aptly - polished on the outside while distinctly less glamorous on the inside.

The campus itself was a sprawling mass of buildings and quads and dorms; here an administrative office, there a lecture hall. The architecture reminded Mikodez of impossible ink drawings done by that one artist who'd almost certainly been on mind-altering drugs for the entirety of their career: certain sections of the grounds rose up into skyscrapers paying homage to the Citadel of Eyes beyond, while others burrowed down ten levels deep. There were as many classrooms in the guts of the earth as there were in the sky; architectural variety was the only thing one seemed to be able to count on, besides the omnipresent Shuos red and gold.

'There are a number of reasons why it's so scattered,' explained the cadet who was leading the orientation tour that Mikodez found himself a part of. 'One is that, of course, the Academy has been built and rebuilt over the years to meet new needs or to improve on old designs. But it also helps that the Shuos are almost always fighting the budget: sometimes all that can be afforded are the basics, and other times they come into a lot of money that needs to be…' She smiled, a fox's smile. '… washed, let's just say, and what better investment is there than the Academy? It  _may_  possibly explain why the Greater Auditorium's bathrooms have marble floors.'

Mikodez smiled at them from where he was in the middle of the group. 'Or perhaps,' he offered, 'it was the marble suppliers who were doing the laundering.'

The guide gave him one brief  _look_ , then resumed the tour up without any further comment.

After the tour ended, they were dispatched to their new living quarters. First-year cadets were roomed together in six-bed bunkrooms engineered, or so Mikodez privately thought, in such a way as to instil in prospective Shuos as early as possible a deep sense of mistrust of others. The layout of each first year bunkroom was radial: three double-level beds extruded from the apexes of the triangular-shaped rooms. It meant no privacy and very little room for just about anything. The space between the bunks afforded just enough room for a locker and some drawers and a mirror apiece. The walls were a drab pale cream and the ceilings a blank white. There were no desks. Work, they had been informed, was to be done in the libraries or dedicated study rooms.

If the idea was to push first-years out of their comfort zones, Mikodez could only applaud the design. It was claustrophobic and overcrowded and basically a powder-keg of potentially disastrous interpersonal relations. The bunkrooms looked like they belonged in a backwater Kel base.

Second-years and up, they were informed, qualified for singles, and with increasing seniority came better sized rooms, more amenities, and more favourable locations on campus. This was a temporary hazing; a way of separating wheat from chaff.

'Shuos might not have to live like Kel,' said the weathered custodian who was administering them their access keys. 'But you damn well sometimes have to live  _as_  Kel, so think of this as practice, kids.'

Mikodez filed away his keys but thought nothing of them; it was hardly as though he was going to leave anything in that excuse of a room to begin with.

* * *

There was also, Mikodez felt, very likely a third reason for Shuos Academy's eclectic design: it was good practice for future Shuos agents.

By virtue of not seeming to be able to make up its mind about what it wanted to  _be_ , Shuos Academy had chaos built into its bones. While individual spaces made little real coherent sense in relation to each other, the atomic pieces of Academy nevertheless coalesced into a pleasingly complex whole. It gave no illusions of uniformity or order - and in that, Mikodez felt, it provided a good facsimile of the the real world beyond its gates. It was a excellent choice for a training ground meant to breed assassins and spies and aggressive bureaucrats. The bones of the Academy served as a physical reminder that the world was messy, random, nonsensical: you had to learn how to navigate the chaos to find opportunities to succeed.

Which is why, really, Mikodez had wedged himself between some shelves in the second largest library on campus.

Libraries were a prominent throwback that the Shuos had never given up on: soft records could always be hacked, but printed material was somewhat eternal - especially if the Shuos were the ones maintaining them. Mikodez liked that: both the redundancy and the chance for gratuitous editorialising of the historical record. Where the other factions had largely gone digital, the Shuos stayed physical, and Mikodez knew they had survived more than one series of bad data decays as a result. There were libraries everywhere on campus.

On the seventh floor of the one he was in, Mikodez had removed a pile of tall but shallow reference books and was in the process of installing a lock box on the back of the now-empty shelf they had sat on. Judging by the amount of dust, those books had sat there undisturbed for possibly as long as he'd been alive.

Into the lock box went credit chips and a few other items from Mikodez's personal effects that he deemed worth saving from the wandering hands of his fellow cadets. It had hardly been four days since the start of term and already there had been reports of things stolen or  _misplaced_. The meditation beads went into the box as well.

Mikodez then replaced all the books he had taken out - rendering the lock box effectively hidden - and spent the next hour wiping down the rest of the shelves in the aisle, and the adjacent ones too, so as to ensure they all looked uniform.

 _Opportunity in chaos_ , Mikodez thought to himself as he wandered back across the Academy to his assigned bunkroom. He was only applying what they were trying to teach him.

* * *

Mikodez had never meant anything by stashing the beads away; nothing beyond safeguarding what was his in the event of some rainy day. But the thought of something of value just sitting and gathering dust made him think, and once Mikodez started  _thinking_  it was really quite hard to  _stop_.

At first, he tried to push it out of his mind. He was certainly busy enough that first semester: Shuos indoctrination started early, and everyone and everything at the Academy was engineered to beat a certain fox-like way of thinking into new cadets. Mikodez obediently went to his classes and read his propaganda-filled textbooks. He amused himself writing note-perfect answers to tests and on homework assignments, all of which he was sure were being used as grist for the psych evaluation mill that undoubtedly was grinding away to place cadets in their future assignments.

He watched his classmates and his teachers with equal interest, and for months the anthropological study proved sufficient preoccupation even for Mikodez. He placed bets with himself and played the role of both gambler and bookie. Mikodez picked someone - anyone - and made his guesses about one thing or another in that person's life, then went on to see how much he could find out of the truth. It started out simple. Without allowing himself much more than a first impression, Mikodez asked himself: was this cadet left-handed? Was that one from a Kel family? He found that even the easy questions were worthwhile: they helped him examine his own biases where they were wrong, and highlighted his good instincts where he was right.

Mikodez inhaled books and old wives' tales on profiling and detection. He absorbed statistics on a variety of everyday subjects, all of which came in useful in stacking the deck in his favour. Mikodez internalised localised data (how many cadets went on to what assignments; what the public Shuos budget was; top-level census numbers), then broadened his scope to general facts and figures about the Hexarchate. He learned how many of the major languages were spoken where, and a good number of the semi-major ones, too. He memorised economic benchmarks. He catalogued public health markers.

The devil's advocate in him wondered if any of this was actually  _useful_. Mikodez concluded, after a few months, that it was: his guesses got better, his gut was more often correct. He was  _faster_ , too: while most information was public and easily accessible, he found you couldn't juggle facts that you didn't have in your own memory. When he had to look things up, he found himself losing track of the main problem.

It didn't matter if he wasn't  _always_  right, or if his numbers weren't  _always_  accurate. Mikodez worked to keep himself  _generally_ up-to-date and learned to be comfortable with probability instead of certainty. There would always be edge cases: outliers were the most interesting parts of any system. As for the rest: the important thing was knowing how to get to roughly the right idea as quickly as possible so that you could get to the  _exact_ answers with a minimum of on-the-ground investigation.

Case in point: Mikodez tasked himself with finding out how much a good-looking but terribly annoying fellow cadet's family earned in a year. He'd picked the boy out at random: someone who just happened to sit next to Mikodez in their Advanced Statistics module. Mikodez put his bets on the cadet's family being solidly within 10% of the Hexarchate median.

How he got there:

  * The cadet spoke with a strong Eastern Volgate accent, which placed him firmly as a native or recent displacement from the 6-Chi system;
  * 6-Chi was notoriously stable; very few families moved from it, and the possibility of having such a strong accent after only recent move  _to_  it was slim;
  * 6-Chi's gross production was very nearly in the exact median of all Hexarchate systems: it was often used as a case-study in economics modules;
  * A majority of the 6-Chi population was engaged in the same profession: mining. Deep veins, unionised labour, and good management were the reason why the system was so stable;
  * Unionised wages for mining in that sector were all within a standard deviation of each other, and if the entire family worked in it - Mikodez was hazarding that the cadet was first-generation Academy - then, annualised, it would put them around the 50th percentile of the rest of the Hexarchate.



By the time class was dismissed, Mikodez had looked up the cadet's family name, used that to access birth/death records on 6-Chi, and confirmed that he had grown up in a census neighbourhood that was owned by one of the three major mining corps in that system.

Almost good enough, but since Mikodez wanted to be  _thorough_ , he logged into a public console with credentials he'd stolen from someone three bunkrooms down from his own. ( _Who_ , he'd wondered, _wrote_ _down their login information_  on  _paper_? It had hardly been theft: more like reading. Still - the subtler question of  _what_  he had been doing in that bunkroom had no ready answer, and Mikodez was willing to let it go.) He hacked the Bursar's office: not the system itself, but the mail server. If a cadet needed financial assistance, offers had to be made and negotiated - and there it was. An email from thirteen months ago from said cadet to a member of the office's staff, requesting a further 10% coverage of term fees. An insecure attachment contained his family's financial records for proof.

'Why did they even admit you?' Mikodez wondered idly and out loud, but he was pleased to see that he was right: when he plugged the numbers into a census calculator, it spat out the result - 57th percentile.

Three months earlier, Mikodez knew, and he'd have guessed 75th or higher. The cadet wore an extremely expensive watch.

* * *

It snowballed from there.

Mikodez supposed that it was vaguely unconscionable that he hadn't bothered to  _remember_  the name of the cadet from 6-Chi. But what was one more name amongst so many others? Mikodez valued throughput over storage, when it came to his memory. Still, his fellow cadet went on sitting next to Mikodez in Statistics, his studious head bent over his notes: a pleasant aesthetic distraction during class. Mikodez eventually learned to stop forgetting that the cadet sitting to his left was named Jeang Herzhen.

Jeang Herzhen was the catalyst.

* * *

'Catalyst for what?' Istradez asked Mikodez a year later. They were catching up; having survived his first year, Mikodez was home on holiday. Shuos Academy, unlike its Kel equivalent, saw nothing to gain from trapping its cadets on-campus without leave: better to let them go for a few months once in a while, spread the destruction out a little.

Mikodez shrugged and rolled up his sleeves. They were in the kitchen baking; he had a craving for some sweet buns that conveniently dovetailed with his desire to never touch cafeteria food ever again.

'Just a catalyst,' he said, whimsical. 'I don't really know how I'd label it. "My first mistake" sounds a little misleading. "My first victim" makes me sound like a criminal. I didn't  _mean_  anything by what happened. So I'll just go with "first catalyst." Pass me the sugar, please.'

Istradez rolled her eyes. 'If you used to talk in circles, now you talk in recursive loops.' She passed him the sugar, but stayed otherwise out of his way. Mikodez had always been better with his hands, and baking was no exception.

'I didn't join up with the Shuos to learn how to be direct,' Mikodez said merrily, working the dough under his hands. Bean paste, he decided. Bean paste was the right filling here. 'To return to the topic at hand, though: all I'd wanted to do was find out where that damned  _watch_  had come from.'

'Ah,' said Istradez. 'I see where this is going.'

* * *

The watch was unmistakably expensive, even to an untrained eye. It was hand-wound but in spite of that had an absurdly thin case made of polished and treated gold; the turtle and wave patterns on the face were easily identifiable as having been hand-engraved. Underneath twin sapphire-crystal front and backs, the watch's gearing was exposed and shimmered with calendrical effects that kept the whole thing effortlessly calibrated. It was really more a work of art than something manufactured. 

While he would never have called himself a connoisseur of mechanical horologics, Mikodez had seen more than a few similar timepieces gracing the wrists of his parents' acquaintances. Truth be told, his parents owned one or two pieces themselves, but had a habit of calling them alternately "investments" and "ticking time bombs."

'Literally ticking,' Mikodez recalled his eldest parent telling him when he'd shown Mikodez the family collection.

Ever practical, the Vauhan did not bother with velvet-lined display cases: his parent had all four timepieces stored in individual lock-boxes. His parent had let Mikodez handle one of the watches and said, 'I've personally seen individuals get sent up to Doctrine because a mechanical piece wasn't wound up correctly. Automatics are safer - less chance of going heretical on you - and if they  _do_  decay you just blame the manufacturer. But one of  _these_? If you have them in storage, they'd better be dead. And if you have them on your wrist, they'd better be wound, or else. The finer-made ones come with calendricals  _in_  them to stop you from accidentally ending up with a very expensive one-way ticket to being reeducated. But even calendricals can become corrupted, so if you ever end up insane enough to want one of these, Miki, you'd better get them re-tuned fairly regularly. Any place capable of even stocking these to sell them to you will do calibrations without a fee: hard to sell to a clientele if said clientele is dead. So, what do you think?'

'I think,' Mikodez remembered saying, 'that this blue and green watch face would clash with our colouring something awful - who made the stupid decision to buy  _this_  one over something with more reds or golds?'

He hadn't had opportunity or desire to further inspect the family timepieces after that, but Mikodez did keep his eye out for what others wore. Manual wind-up pieces were fairly common at the more glittery social events and dinner parties he used to get invited to, but they were almost always worn as statement pieces: jewellery and objects d'art, not day-to-day timekeepers. Mikodez was willing to bet that most of those pieces were taken out of storage for a maximum of three or four evenings all year, then rendered dead and put back the moment their owners were done showing off.

And yet here was Jeang Herzhen, a student from a family of humble means, who wore a mechanical timepiece worth more than the tuition to Shuos Academy which he claimed he could not afford.

* * *

In some ways, Mikodez reflected, Herzhen was doing a very good job of accidentally ensuring that Mikodez did well in his classes.

His record at school had always been spotty; Mikodez could just never  _focus_  long enough to get  _consistently_  good grades. One semester he'd be a standard deviation above the rest of his class; the next and he'd be the bane of half his teachers' existence. Mikodez'd once forgotten to show up for a test weighted at 25% of his final grade and had  _still_  finished above the 80th percentile, but that was in counterpoint times when he'd fail a class because he'd turn his homework in to the wrong teacher.

Still, Mikodez had sworn to reform himself as part of a vague plan to become a functional adult, and part of his signing up with the Academy had been to guarantee his placement into a system with built-in discipline and structure. It had already helped his grades even if it wasn't helping his health, and his new preoccupation with Herzhen meant that Mikodez had to keep up good work habits in order to afford himself the freedom to pursue his extracurriculars.

Assignments became obstacles, the faster obliterated the better. Mikodez stopped trying to be clever about his papers; he cut out the sarcastic neutral tones and simply wrote what he thought in an attempt to clear out his schoolwork as efficiently as possible.

The headaches and insomnia that accompanied this newborn work ethic of his were old annoyances; bitter bedmates that Mikodez had hoped he'd grow apart from. But by the time he found himself irascible from sleep-deprivation and losing weight out from picking at the cafeteria's hatefully bland options, it was too late to stop. The machinery of constant motion had been put in place, and Mikodez was content to ride it out. There was nothing to be done: he assumed that the symptoms were just those of overwork, and would go away in time as they had always done and would always must do.

* * *

Mikodez's approach to cracking the case of Herzhen's watch was simple: find out where it came from. Pieces like those were often limited release special editions. Mikodez did a minimum of fawning over Herzhen's wrist during a study session one day - what an interesting design, where did it come from? - and was given leave to inspect the watch.

'It was a gift,' Herzhen deflected in that backwater accent of his.

'It's very nice,' Mikodez agreed neutrally, not letting on exactly  _how nice_  he knew it to be. He was beginning to wonder if  _Herzhen_  even knew himself, even if it was obvious that he was hiding something about it being a gift: he simply wore it too casually. Sapphire faces could take a beating, no doubt, but Herzhen treated the watch like he wouldn't feel out of place wearing it into a coal mine.

In any case, Mikodez didn't let himself linger: he saw an engraving that read  _4/7_  on the side of the rim opposite from the dial, and that was all he needed to know. He handed it back, and Herzhen relaxed when Mikodez asked no further questions but instead enlightened him on how higher order derivatives  _meant_  anything in any real sense.

There were only so many watches like  _that_  that had limited production runs of seven. Strange number, really. Out of fashion.

 _Dear Istra,_  he wrote to his sister later that night.

_I need to call in something of a favour. You're better at this than I am - you know one kind of shiny bauble from all the other kinds of shiny baubles - and the sad fact is that I don't have the time to do independent research here at the Academy beyond what I can get off of the net. So if you could nose around a little bit at home and ask some questions, I'd be delighted if you could find out what this watch is - and if you manage to hunt down any sales records, all the better…_

It would take a while, Mikodez had no doubt, for Istradez to get him anything useful; pieces of that level of craftsmanship did not tend to get bought or sold online. She'd have to go out and rub shoulders and meet and greet a few people, and for all that Istradez was excellent at and enjoyed that sort of business, it was still a tall order. It had already cost Mikodez the price of three new couture dresses:  _if you want me to hobnob, Miki, you're going to have to help me look the part,_  she'd said.

Still, there was plenty else to do to keep Mikodez occupied. Herzhen himself was the best available source of information, really, and if Mikodez  _had_  to attend all these tedious Shuos classes on things like espionage and stealth and who-knows-what, he might as well put it all to good use.

Mikodez, therefore, put on the air of a hardworking and studious little dog, and tracked Herzhen as he went along his mundane way in life. The man, Mikodez was sure, was pathologically addicted to studying. That, or he was just extremely bad at learning: it was hard to tell anything about Herzhen except that he practically lived in the libraries. Mikodez would have had a harder time spying on drying paint.

The average schedule of Jeang Herzhen, mediocre B-grade student, was as roughly as follows:

0700: wake up, conduct morning ablutions, breakfast  
0800: start the day with a light 30-minute study session in the Mirrored Library  
0830 - 1200: classes, with breaks spent chain-smoking whenever he managed to get outside  
1200 - 1300: lunch, meagre and always at the cafeteria  
1300 - 1600: more classes, more chain-smoking  
1600 - 1730: a brief return to the bunks to shower, repack his book bag, run errands such as picking up mail &c.  
1730 - 2030 at minimum: library time; which library was as varied as the weather. Maybe he was trying not to play favourites.

How much work a person could possibly  _fail to finish_  after spending three hours in the library every  _day_ , Mikodez could not personally comprehend. The mathematics of that equation were astronomical. But Herzhen's earnest brow was always furrowed, and he always had questions at the study sessions and office hours which he would attend with horrifying regularity.

For three weeks, Mikodez bored himself to nearly to tears watching Herzhen. He was just about to give up and wait for Istradez to get back to him when it struck him that something about Herzhen's abysmal schedule  _was_  odd: without fail, he picked up a package from the mail room once a week. Like clockwork, really.

They weren't particularly small packages, either, now that Mikodez stopped to think about it. He'd always assumed that they were simply care packages sent by Herzhen's fretful blue-collar parents, but that couldn't possibly be the case: shipping from 6-Chi was enormously expensive, and a family like that wouldn't send gifts of that size that regularly even if they got it shipped in from somewhere closer.

So what was in those boxes? And where was it all  _going_ , considering that you couldn't hide much of anything in their first-year bunks?

* * *

The next time Mikodez casually wandered into the same library as Herzhen, he applied - dutifully - every lesson on recon and observation he'd received and realised, as adrenaline pooled hot in his stomach, that there was a reason why so many Shuos agents wanted to be spies and assassins after all: it was actually quite invigorating.

Mikodez watched as Herzhen got up from his prime position at one of the private booths, leaving his papers there but not, curiously, his book bag. Odd thing for someone to take a book bag on a toilet run. Mikodez watched as Herzhen found an open reference terminal and looked something up, then headed off for the stacks.

After a reasonable wait, Mikodez approached the terminal and looked up its search history. Ah, now  _that_  was interesting: Herzhen had punched in not a title nor a text search but a straight-up reference number. Even someone like that didn't simply  _memorise_  references down to the third decimal: Herzhen had known where he wanted to go, and Mikodez was beginning to suspect that the location of the book he'd looked up was more important than the book itself.

The stacks were, unfortunately, not a very good place to try sneaking up on someone. Narrow and cramped, the metal shelves formed echo-chambers for even the softest of noises. Mikodez opted to wait in the stairwell landing half a level up instead: there was only one lift bay and one set of stairs, and he could watch and wait all comings and goings from there.

If Herzhen was meeting anyone, it certainly wasn't for a quick carnal get together outside of the dorms. Mikodez heard no voices even though the sound of Herzhen shuffling books around was clearly audible. Mikodez was going to be very disappointed if it  _did_  turn out that the man was really just a servitor dressed up in a human's body. Still, he kept quiet and waited. Herzhen eventually finished whatever it was he was doing and left. From the stairwell, Mikodez could see him but not the other way around as Herzhen waited for a lift to arrive on their floor: no books in hand, and his book bag looked emptier, not fuller.

Emptier? Mikodez felt a smile cross his face. Once Herzhen was in the elevator and away, Mikodez ducked out and tracked down the shelf with the reference number Herzhen'd looked up.

'I guess I wasn't the only one who wanted a hiding pla,' Mikodez murmured to himself when he pulled the book in question back and found, to his complete surprise, a half-brick of solid and rather well-packed amphetamines -  _Burst_ , if Mikodez had to guess - in the hollow behind it.

That should have been the most surprising part of his day, Mikodez reflected later as he lay in his bunk that night, silent but feeling as though he was going to vibrate out of his own skin. Herzhen the drug mule.

But it wasn't. The real surprise had come thirty minutes later, when their very boring professor of calendrical history had shown up in that very same stack to pick up what Herzhen had dropped off.

As Mikodez lay there, counting his breaths so that he could keep them measured, he saw the puzzle pieces fitting themselves together. Not  _all_  of them: there were still gaping holes in the system, but the overarching picture of things was making itself clear to him.

The kid who could not afford to attend the Academy on Shuos Prime. A watch too expensive for the wrist it was on. The drugs left behind and then picked up by faculty members, with no evidence of monetary exchange on-site. The time spent in the library and at office hours. The large packages - big enough to fit at least a good few dozen or so drops of the size Mikodez had seen that night - which were never searched nor confiscated by the Academy staff.

All this knowledge is power, Mikodez thought to himself, lacing and unlacing his fingers where they sat atop his chest. But power to do what?

Mikodez decided that making any subsequent move would be ill-advised without some time spent cooling off and thinking about the situation from a more strategic perspective. If reading one too many books on military history had taught him anything, it was that emotional decisions got you nowhere except into trouble: and so he waited.

He got a good night's rest. He looked up  _Burst_  and spent some time learning about the underlying chemistry of the drug. It had an amphetamine base but, by dint of clever design, delivered its high in measured, mellow waves that took only thirty minutes to plateau but then  _stayed_  plateaued for up to four hours.

'Hm,' Mikodez said to himself, considering, and then went on to look up the general street prices. It wasn't by any means cheap, and he supposed that any amount dealt on the Academy campus would be marked up due to the complications of getting it through security.

Perhaps it would be best to test this  _Burst_  before going any further, Mikodez thought, and contrived a way to get himself a refreshed invitation to one of the parties hosted by the upperclassmen.

It wasn't hard. He did, after all, have the Vauhan family's good looks.

* * *

The room the party was in was cramped and dark and far too packed for anyone's comfort, but as Mikodez threaded his way through the crowd he reflected that its organisers had done a good job out of bad circumstances. For a maximum of plausible deniability, they had chosen not to attempt this in one of the upperclassman dorms, but instead had found a way of breaking into the athletic facility and requisitioning one of the mostly-empty storage rooms. Shuos weren't well known for being either sportsmen or sportsmanlike, and so there were plenty of those to go around.

Tonight, Storage Room 413 was a black box suppurating in the smell of sweat and spilt alcohol. The concrete floor was slippery and sticky in turns and the walls - built brutalist and thick - threw the echo of the blaring-loud music back at the revellers, their bodies the only insulation there was. It was a pleasant sort of chaos, Mikodez decided: as easy to be seen and touched in as it was to go unseen and untouched in turn.

He acquired a drink from the corner of the room which passed as the bar: unmanned, one was left to pick between trying out a hangman's roulette of premixed drinks of ambiguous origins or to attempt to concoct one's own witch's brew from the remaining scattered bottles. Mikodez poured himself a cup of water, then took himself through the room to acquaint himself with fellow cadets who knew who he was.

Mikodez was midway through a half-yelled, half-pantomimed conversation with a classmate when he heard a shout of 'Vauhan!' from behind him. He turned to see Ylang, their host and host of many other of these Academy parties besides, closing in on him. 'About time you showed up to one of my parties again!'

'I've been busy,' Mikodez replied, telling only half a lie: the  _whole_  truth was that, disinterested as he was in seeking out bedpartners, the parties rarely appealed. Still: he dipped into his jacket pocket and withdrew an anonymised credit chip, which he handed over to Ylang without ceremony. 'Thank you for hosting.'

Ylang looked down at it and blinked, but he wasn't slow on the uptake and soon Mikodez found himself enveloped by an arm thrown genially over his shoulders. 'You're a good guest, Vauhan,' Ylang declared, towing Mikodez away from his classmate. She looked disappointed, but she would have been disappointed in any case.

It turned out that there was a quieter second storeroom, and Mikodez spent a few hours that night giving  _Burst_  a thorough,  _thorough_  field testing.

He decided, walking with determined sobriety back to his bunk as dawn crested up on the horizon, that he approved. Mikodez patted his breast pocket, where the extra eighth which Ylang had given him as "a token of friendship" sat awaiting its call to duty.

* * *

'Sorry,' Istradez reported in a few days later, serendipitous in her timing. 'I can tell you the exact make and model of the watch - I've sent you the details - but chasing down who or what bought the fourth unit of the run from six years ago is a tall order. I'll keep looking.' She paused, and narrowed her eyes. 'Miki, have you  _slept_  at all this week? You've got  _eyebags_.'

'I'll put some cucumber slices on them,' Mikodez said primly, and opted not to inform Istradez about his newfound coping mechanism.

After that, Mikodez allowed himself to act a little more rashly.  _Improvising,_  he figured. He was improvising. Acting on a gut feeling that the watch was more likely to be some sort of marker or signal than payment in barter, he took note of all of Herzhen's lectures and the faculty members who taught them. After that, it came down to a little judicious use of Herzhen's student login (keyloggers on library consoles really shouldn't be that easy to install) and Mikodez found himself - almost literally - in business.

'That's one way to give someone a grade, I suppose,' he mused as he read over Herzhen's awful Geometry work. Underneath the D grade was a little note - gibberish to anyone who might read it incidentally, just numbers and decimals and then a datetime stamp. Mikodez plugged it into the library lookup system:  _Introduction to Geometry for Kel Crashhawks_ , it read.

'Harsh,' Mikodez concluded. 'Very harsh.'

And so one battery-powered camera carefully located where it had a full view of the  _Geometry for Kel Crashhawks_  shelf later and Mikodez, come the appointed time, was able to watch - and record - the transaction from the comfort of his own bunk.

He was debating what to  _do_  with the footage, both of Herzhen making the drop and of their geometry instructor picking it up, when it occurred to him that his migraines had come back in full force since his personal supply of  _Burst_  had run out.

What was the saying? One crashhawk, two purposes?

* * *

It did not take long for another drop to be arranged.

When Herzhen rounded the corner in search of  _Poetry, The Non-Andan Way_ , Mikodez was propped artfully up against the shelf in question, nose-deep in the second chapter ("On Metaphor"). He looked up when Herzhen stopped short. Mikodez could see the panic in his eyes and wondered, for a moment, why Herzhen had never prepared anything - a script, an excuse - for this exact eventuality.

'Did you think you were going to get away with never meeting anyone in the stacks forever?' asked Mikodez, snapping the volume shut and waving it around a little. 'Don't run, and don't worry too much. I'm merely asking as a concerned spectator.'

'Vauhan?' Herzhen gaped. It wasn't an attractive look on him; a waste of good cheekbones.

'Mikodez, please,' Mikodez said. 'I don't think we need to stand on any ceremony here.'

Herzhen seemed flabbergasted. 'How- What?'

'I have a few questions,' Mikodez went on, popping the book back into its place on the shelf without quite pushing it all the way flush with the others in the row. 'If you don't mind me asking them. I know you're dropping off  _Burst_  -' he saw Herzhen go pale '- but I really don't have any interest in reporting you. I'm more hound than fox, really, and I admire the setup you've got going.'

Herzhen looked neither convinced nor reassured by that, somehow. Mikodez tried again, a little more directly this time.

'You see, I'd really like to purchase some of what you're selling, but I cannot for the life of me put some of the pieces of your business together.' He crossed his arms, posture still loose. 'The fact that you're peddling to faculty, I get. That you get your shipments via mail and have an agreement to not get your packages screened, I get. That you're dropping it off at designated spots in the library for them to pick up, I also get. But how are you receiving payment?'

'Payment?' Herzhen parroted, a dumb marionette with his strings cut.

'Payment,' Mikodez nodded, encouraging. 'Presumably that  _is_  the end goal? You're certainly not getting repaid by them grading you more leniently.'

The absurdity of his situation seemed to finally sink in for Herzhen, and his shoulders sagged in what Mikodez guessed was a mixture of defeat and relief. A secret discovered was both a secret broken and a secret shared, after all. Herzhen set his book bag down, hung his head and scratched the back of his neck, and suddenly all Mikodez could see was a country bumpkin from 6-Chi trying to make his way in the world.

'I don't know, and that'll be the truth out of me,' Herzhen admitted, chagrined. He looked up at Mikodez. 'I'm just the go-between.' He shook his wrist, flashing the watch. 'They gave me this watch before I got to campus and told me to wear it. Makes me recognisable without naming any names, you see. The profs see the watch, and then they leave their order and where and when they want to pick it up. When I run out, I reject the next order to come in and then a week later a new shipment comes in.'

Mikodez blinked. That hadn't been what he was expecting. 'And what do  _you_  get for putting yourself at considerable risk?'

Herzhen actually blushed. Mikodez fought to stop from smiling, but it was a charming look on the other man. 'I mean,' Herzhen dithered. 'I get to go here.'

Mikodez did some rapid rearrangement of facts in his head. 'They sponsor your attending the Academy?' It made sense: if the watch was payment in kind, Herzhen would have had to have liquidated it a long time ago to afford the fees, even though the Shuos Academy was - in theory - sponsored by the Shuos government.

'Yeah,' Herzhen mumbled. 'When I got accepted, my family couldn't afford it. The books and dorms and whatnot, you know? I was about to give up when the Bursar set me up with a deal. All I had to do was follow instructions. And that's all I'm doing, I swear!' He kicked his bag. 'I wouldn't touch that stuff for nothing!'

Mikodez stopped fighting his smile. 'It's not the best for you, I'll admit,' he said. 'So who is responsible for the shipments, then? Presumably if it were the Academy, they wouldn't bother with a go-between.'

'I don't know,' Herzhen shrugged helplessly. 'I told you, I just follow the instructions. I don't know, and I sure as heck don't  _want_  to know.'

 _Dead end,_  Mikodez thought.  _Or maybe just a loose end tied off._  He nodded at Herzhen's bag. 'I can understand that sentiment. But now I have a proposal for you.'

Herzhen instantly backed up a step. Good: he wasn't  _entirely_  clueless. 'I thought you said you weren't gonna rat me out.'

'I'm not,' Mikodez continued patiently. 'My proposal is that I help you offload some of your shipments.' He dipped a hand into his pocket and watch Herzhen recoil, but all Mikodez pulled out was his set of meditation beads. Time to put them to good use. 'Do you know what these are?' he asked.

'Not a sex toy, I'm hoping?' Herzhen ventured, looking pale.

Mikodez took a moment to recover himself. 'No,' he said, clearing his throat and making a note to work on his poker face. 'Not even close. They're doctrinal meditation beads. One for every major and minor Remembrance on the calendar.'

'That's a lotta praying,' Herzhen blurted out.

Mikodez found himself grinning again. 'It is,' he agreed. 'More importantly for us, they don't come cheap. Each bead in this set is worth its own weight in, well, Kryzhan opal. That's what they're made out of.'

Herzhen may not have been many things, but what he certainly was was a miner's son: his eyes widened in recognition. 'Kryzhan opal doesn't come cheap,' he said, voice low.

'Yes,' Mikodez confirmed. 'And I am willing to trade you eight of the major beads for half a brick.' That was eight eights, by street standards. 'You can do whatever you want with them afterwards: pawn them for credit value, hold on to them for security, or trade them for who knows what. The point is that bartered goods aren't easily traceable - to me  _or_  to you.'

'What if they find out?' Herzhen asked, but Mikodez could see his hook had caught. 'A half brick's a lot - whoever they are, they're going to notice.'

Mikodez reeled it in. 'A half brick is an eighth removed from every second drop, or a fourth from every one. Somehow I doubt that your consumers are measuring their pickups: most order in relatively small amounts because it's better to not have any on hand if someone comes sniffing, yes?'

Herzhen hesitated, but it was the hesitation of someone who had made a decision that they had not quite come around to accepting yet.

'You have my oath of silence,' Mikodez said, and watched the words twist Herzhen around. 'Neither of us would do well to be found out.'

Herzhen exhaled, noisy and vexed but - ultimately - convinced. 'You know what? Why the heck not.' He stuck his hands into his pockets, but Mikodez could see the outline of him clenching and unclenching his fists. 'Just because they pay for my tuition doesn't mean that I don't need the money.'

'In which case I am glad to be of assistance,' Mikodez said, and it surprised him how the statement - which had started out ironic in his head - had come out sincere from his mouth.

More relaxed now, Herzhen scuffed his shoes on the ground and then rallied: he picked up his bag and dug around for the  _Burst_. He handed Mikodez his portion. 'So, eight beads off of the set - won't you miss your prayers?'

Mikodez, pocketing the drugs, almost could not bring himself to say  _no._

* * *

After that first exchange, Mikodez bought Herzhen a scale accurate down to the microgram and helped him repackage the remaining bags. It wasn't hard work; the packets hadn't been all that professionally done up to begin with.

Working side by side with Herzhen in some storeroom cleared for them by Ylang, Mikodez fell into a happy,  _Burst_ -assisted rhythm of break, measure, reseal, repack. The work was accompanied by Herzhen's constant but not overwhelming prattle: he told Mikodez about 6-Chi and about his family and about how, for all his grades for most theoretical classes were abysmal, he was really quite good with his hands.

'Do you want to be an assassin or something?' Mikodez asked, amused despite himself. He couldn't imagine Herzhen, with his earnest face and big hands, doing work in the shadows.

'Engineer,' Herzhen shook his head. He was faster at Mikodez at packing, that much was true: Mikodez found his hands sometimes shook too much.

'Are you sure you enrolled in the right place?' Mikodez teased. 'Shouldn't you be with the Nirai?'

'I've seen Nirai tech, held it in my hands,' Herzhen said meditatively. It was the first time Mikodez had seem him sure about his own opinion. 'It's… You ever see something so perfect that you think to yourself, there's got to be a catch? Maybe it's a trap?'

Mikodez nodded -  _go on_.

'That's the stuff that comes down from the Nirai,' Herzhen shrugged. 'And I don't want to be always catching up on the maths, not beyond what it takes to get to the engineering courses. Second years on get to be in the machine shops -  _then_  I'll be happy.'

By the end of their work session, Mikodez and Herzhen found themselves surveying rows on rows of neatly packaged  _Burst_.

'You know,' Mikodez said as they un-gloved and de-gowned, throwing all of the precautionary sterile gear away to be incinerated. 'If your seller just put a little bit more thought into branding and packaging, I bet he could make a lot more money.'

'Maybe you can do that as your fourth year project,' Herzhen said solemnly, and then even laughed.

* * *

Mikodez did his own repacking of the portion that Herzhen had sold to him. A good part of it he hid in various locations across campus: places he studied often, where he could take a hit into the bathrooms and stave off the headaches and short-temperedness that accompanied them. But even then Mikodez knew he couldn't - or shouldn't, maybe - take  _all_  of it for himself: he'd bought the half-block on a whim, to see how far he could push Herzhen more than anything else.

He thought to himself that a good Shuos bureaucrat might find a better, more secure hiding place for the stock and then siphon it off slowly for personal use. But then he figured that that was why the Shuos were so damned  _poor,_ and so Mikodez disposed of the amount in excess of what he wanted for himself by doing the logical thing: he resold it.

* * *

The next party that Ylang hosted, Mikodez attended. When Ylang invited him into the back room, Mikodez went. Did they have any  _Burst_ , he asked? No, Ylang shook their head - supply was hard to find; that they had had some on hand the last time Mikodez had shown up bad been pure luck.

'I've got a proposition for you, then,' Mikodez said. Ylang wore a watch - it was orders of magnitude less expensive than the one that Herzhen had, but it was still a very nice watch. Mikodez pointed at it. 'Let's say that, hypothetically, I had some amount or another of  _Burst_  that I wanted to offload. Because I am an upstanding student of this Academy, same as you -' Ylang sketched out a mock-bow, hinging at the waist like a dancer '- I certainly do not want any credit trails laid down that may lead to my own accounts. So I propose to you this: you barter me that watch for 6 minors from this set.' Mikodez held up his string of meditation beads. 'That, or 3 majors. One minor buys you a fourth; a major a half. If you don't want to buy, you can also pawn the beads off - you'll find they're not worth nothing. What do you say?'

Ylang, about five drinks and an equal number of other substances into their night, blinked. 'You're a foxy one, Vauhan,' they said eventually, but they were flipping the clasp on their watch and handing it over. 'I look forward to doing business with you.'

* * *

 _Dear Istra,_  Mikodez wrote to his sister a week later in a letter enclosed in a medium-sized package that he sent her way,

_I have enclosed a few baubles. Whichever ones take your fancy, keep for yourself, but then do me a favour and sell off the rest one way or another. Keep the credits as pocket change and buy yourself something nice._

_By the way, any more leads on that timepiece_? 

_Yours, Miki_

 

 _Miki,_  came the response a month later,  _No, still no leads, and what the fuck are you up to anyway? - Istra_

But she had included with that curt response a very nice picture of herself wearing a new emerald choker, and so Mikodez considered himself forgiven.

It was hard to be angry or irritated these days in  _general_ , really, and that was a relief: no more of the tantrums that had got him thrown out of his schools, and his attention wandered a lot less as a pleasant side-effect. Mikodez floated by on an ocean of  _Burst_ ; he felt like a splinter of driftwood content to lash about on the open seas, untroubled any longer by the crest and crash of the waves.

In the space of that single month, he had bartered off half of his beads - and been bartered back half of them in turn. He sold out his supply too quickly, but Herzhen's next shipment arrived only a week later and Mikodez adjusted his street price accordingly. He was amassing a second package for Istradez to fence: people traded him everything from computer parts to jewellery to other kinds of contraband, all of which Mikodez sampled with vigorous scientific gusto.

By the time end-of-year finals were about to come around, Mikodez found himself the puppet-master of a very miniature but very robust underground economy fuelled by a prayer-bead currency backed by  _Burst_. He wasn't sure he could answer Istradez's question - he wasn't  _up_  to anything; he'd simply found discrepancies and investigated them, then found demand and plugged it with supply. But this whole fox-like enterprise had come around full circle and established itself into a very hound-like system, and Mikodez and his customers and supplier alike were all well-pleased.

Mikodez was impressed by the robustness of it, too: a second-hand economy had very quickly sprung up around the beads, which were now being traded between other individuals who attended Ylang's parties for any number of goods. He'd even seen  _services_ advertised, including - very ironically - certain brands of "tutoring" and "help with homework assignments." (To his knowledge, Herzhen never participated in the market, and his grades in the classes he needed to do well in for an engineering track had improved quite dramatically since Mikodez had started tutoring him during their sessions.)

Truth be told, Mikodez had no way of knowing how many beads had escaped the system - some, undoubtedly, had been pawned off or lost or destroyed - but he was fairly sure that things had stabilised to around 60% of the beads being in steady circulation. Given a 2.5% escape rate every month, he'd perhaps have to get Istradez to go shopping with him at the first major Academy holiday for another set to replenish supply.

All those things were on his mind as he went to pick up his next cut from Herzhen, but when he got there, Herzhen was empty-handed. His wrist was bare, too: no watch.

'What happened?' Mikodez asked, very calm. He wasn't sure what he felt about the situation, but indulging the blend of confusion and untargeted rage that  _something_  was upsetting the equilibrium of his system was unlikely to be productive.

'I don't know,' Herzhen said helplessly. 'I didn't want to tell you anywhere other than in person. But the last shipment was just a package with a return label in it and the instructions were to put the watch in it and ship it off. Maybe it was all just a one-year deal. But I haven't been getting any more orders.'

'What was the return address?'

'Some bunk made-up thing,' Herzhen said. 'I looked it up: of course I did. But the mail system said it never existed, and when I checked the tracking status of the package the whole transaction had disappeared from my account.'

The mail centre was operated by the Academy. It made sense, Mikodez thought grimly: why expose sensitive contact information when they could just have picked up the package when Herzhen had put it in and changed the address during processing?

Mikodez dipped his head and tapped his fingers against his thighs. 'So this is it, then?'

'I guess so,' Herzhen said, watching him cautiously. 'Are you mad?'

Mikodez examined his feelings. 'Not at you,' he said, and found that that was true. 'I think you were just a convenient scapegoat in something much bigger than either of us.'

Herzhen seemed relieved. 'Well… that's good. I like you, Mikodez - weird as it may sound, I do. This was all a big mess and while  _I'm_  glad that it's over, I enjoyed what we were doing. Sort of.'

'“Sort of.” High praise,' Mikodez laughed, though it was more for Herzhen's benefit than anything. He was running out of his personal supply, and had never really thought about what to do if it dried up.

Herzhen grinned; happy were the oblivious. 'Well. That's that, then. You ready for finals?'

'Probably,' Mikodez said, walking Herzhen out. He never really studied until a few days before any test; most information didn't stay in his head even now.

'I've been hitting the stacks for weeks,' Herzhen bemoaned. 'Could you explain that theorem again? The one with all the matrices…'

* * *

When Mikodez got back to his bunk, he lay on it again and thought:  _the trail has gone cold._  There might as well not  _be_  a trail: even if Istradez found out who the original buyer of that watch had been, Mikodez doubted that they'd have been careless enough to leave much of an evidence trail. The name would be as fake as that address had been.

He tried to sleep. Finals were in three weeks; perhaps he should do what everyone else around him was doing and actually  _study_.

But Mikodez didn't sleep well that night, and when he tried to study over the course of the week, he found his concentration shattered. He had never put much stock in his little barter system - it had been an extracurricular; another thought experiment more than anything else. But when the  _Burst_  ran out, he found himself angry, and for lack of a better target to lash out at, Mikodez picked a very few and very stupid targets.

On hindsight, he shouldn't have left the library copies of  _Geometry for Crashhawks_  and  _Poetry: the Non-Andan Way_  on the desks of the lecturers who had used them as the butt of jokes made at the expense of their stupid young drug mule. But what was done was done, and Mikodez hoped they felt as panicked as he felt better for it.

* * *

'What happened then?' Istradez asked. The buns were in the oven, and they were sitting around waiting. The smell of red bean paste filled the kitchen, and the cloying sweetness kept Mikodez from feeling a flashback of real, real  _rage._

'Herzhen was expelled the next day,' he said. 'I didn't even get to see him before he was thrown out.'

* * *

It hadn't been for lack of trying. Mikodez had looked up his number and tried and tried and  _tried_  to get to Herzhen, but every point of contact had been disconnected. That night, Mikodez walked into one of the book repositories on campus - not even a library, just a dumping ground where the many pointless documents generated by the Shuos Academy from years ago were archived - and set it alight. It didn't take much: he simply put a flame to a few pages, and then walked back out again. By the time the library was fully on fire, Mikodez was at one of the main libraries studying at a desk with three other cadets, and no one in the administration seemed intent on investigating further.

He passed his finals with flying colours. Anger, Mikodez discovered, was as good as drug as any other. He was rifling listlessly through his returned transcripts when he stopped dead at one note: it was a library decimal number, and next to it was a timestamp.

Mikodez went. What else was there to do?

* * *

'And?' Istradez asked as Mikodez pulled the buns out of the oven.

'And that was when I met Instructor Zehun in person for the first time,' Mikodez said. 'Zehun-zho: Buyer of Watchers, and the Hound Amongst Foxes. They showed up exactly on time at the designated place and told me exactly what I had done right and wrong with Herzhen, and with my barter system, and how I am going to spend the next semester reprinting every document from the repository and filing them by hand.'

Istradez lost it: she laughed and laughed and laughed. 'They  _knew_? An instructor knew the whole time?'

Mikodez, face a little pinched, just shrugged. Then he gave up and laughed a little as well, before picking up a still-hot bun and biting into it.

'And who was the seller?' Istradez asked. She never missed a loose end.

'Jeang Herzhen was neither Jeang Herzhen nor a real cadet of the Academy,' Mikodez said wryly. Istradez looked quietly delighted, but she didn't mock him.

'So what is going to happen to you?' Istradez asked. 'Did they file a complaint? We would have heard about it by now if they did, or if you'd been expelled. Are they blackmailing you?'

'No,' Mikodez said, chewing thoughtfully on his bun. He needed the calories; Zehun had marched him roundly to an Academy physician, who had - cruelly, in Mikodez's opinion - insisted that he replace his  _Burst_  habit with a regimen of actual medications. His stomach wasn't thanking him for it, even if his head was. Mikodez looked up at Istradez, smiling helplessly, and said, 'No. None of that. I think… they might be mentoring me.'

**Author's Note:**

> The watch: https://www.jomashop.com/vacheron-constantin-watch-33222-000r-9548.html


End file.
